When one needs to debug an issue or gather additional info on various problems with PBXware, Asterisk' own CLI can come in handy.
It prints out a lot of additional info not seen in PBXware's CLIR messages, for every call made on the system, a few more situations.
Entering CLI
Before you can see any of the messages in Asterisk CLI, you need to ssh to the system by using ssh command (if using Linux on your computer) or using Putty or similar software if on PC/MAC.
After that you can enter the Asterisk CLI via the following command
asterisk -rvvvvv
Where Vs define the verbosity level of the CLI.
Once inside you will see a lot of useful information printed out for all actions on the system, Asterisk related though. You will see;
Phone calls
endpoint/aor registrations
Subscribe notifications
reload of system components
Entering CLI with additional debugging
If for some reason you have some inexplicable issues, like Asterisk not being able to start, you can try to run the CLI with different sets of switches which should give some application-specific debug info which includes start-up sequence, database connection, registration retries, etc.
asterisk -rddddd
where the number of Ds defines the verbosity of these debug messages.
If the above command tells you that asterisk is not running:
Try the following command:
asterisk -cdddddd
Running commands outside of CLI
If you don't need to be inside CLI, or you need just to execute some command without concern of output from CLI, you can do so by running the Asterisk command with the following switches being used:
asterisk -rx ‘type your command’
For example:
asterisk -rx ‘pjsip show endpoints’
Above will list endpoints without going into CLI:
PJSIP Debugging
With PBXware versions 5 and 6, we introduced a great tool for troubleshooting SNGREP: https://support.bicomsystems.com/a/solutions/articles/67000673400
However, troubleshooting can be done inside of Asterisk CLI as well.
The first important command to know is:
pjsip set logger on
Enable debugging for specific IP address:
pjsip set logger host XXX
Where XXX is an IP address for which you are enabling debugging:
An additional command that can be used is the ability to store pjsip logger output to PCAP file:
For example:
pjsip set logger pcap /tmp/test.pcap
The path to the output is: /opt/pbxware/pw/tmp.
In order to read a PCAP file, we can use tcpdump or SNGREP, or we can download it to our computer and use Wireshark!
With tcpdump: tcpdump -r /opt/pbxware/pw/tmp/test.pcap
With SNGREP: /opt/pbxware/sh/sngrep -I /tmp/test.pcap
When you finish debugging, you need to turn off debugging since leaving that running clutters the CLI output and you might miss other important information on the system.
To turn off PJSIP debugging run this command:
pjsip set logger off
Codec transcoding list
If for some reason you have audio problems, some of the messages might indicate codec incompatibilities on the system. In such cases you can see the possible translations paths in Asterisk with the following command:
core show translation
List codecs on the system with the command
core show codecs
Reloading the complete Asterisk configuration
In cases, and not limited to, where you did manual modifications to the Asterisk dialplan, you need to reload the complete configuration of the Asterisk subsystem which can be done by a simple command:
reload
This will reload all the configurations related to the Asterisk telephony engine.
Restarting the Asterisk
If reloading Asterisk is not enough for the changes made, or there is another reason to do so, you can restart complete Asterisk with:
restart now
Printing out the Dialplan
PBXware’s implementation of the Asterisk engine uses AGI to control how Asterisk should route the call, but for various reasons, you might be inclined to change a few aspects of how the calls should route.
By default, Asterisk uses Dialplan to route the calls to various other places. Dialplan information is located in several conf files (please check official Asterisk documents on this).
When you change the dial plan in extensions.conf file, for example, you will reload the Asterisk configuration. After that, you will want to show the dial plan to verify that your changes have been applied to it.
To list the complete dial plan in Asterisk run:
diaplan show
Similar will appear:
To list specific dialplan that you wrote/changed run:
dialplan show “dialplan name”
for example:
dialplan show t-custom
List aors and endpoints
When checking extensions and/or availability of trunks, you can print aors/endpoints on the system:
pjsip show endpoints
pjsip show aors
Checking for one specific endpoint with the command:
pjsip show endpoint XXX
Where XXX is an extension or trunk on the system:
pjsip show aor XXX
